As the media hand out more information about the aging process, people naturally want to know how various medical advances can help them personally. At the moment there is a wide divide between the medical establishment and popular opinion. At the grassroots level, millions of people seek alternative solutions to aging, as they do for healing in general. Mainstream doctors lag far behind, since their primary function hasn't shifted from drugs and surgery. Even the most basic prevention programs are more likely to be gotten from a book or magazine than one's family doctor. In the last post I listed 10 indisputable findings in how the mind affects aging. At first they look self-evident. Eating well, exercising, and keeping our mind active aren't special needs for old people. They are needs throughout life. Yet few Americans actually follow preventive measures with any consistency over the years, and older people tend to be the worst at keeping up prevention. The temptation to rely on medications is everywhere, and due to anxiety about their health, millions of older people allow themselves to be over-medicated by doctors who prescribe various drugs by rote, without any real consideration for the individual. All of which is a prelude to making your own decisions about the aging process. Arranging your priorities in the following way could make a huge difference in the coming years. 1. Emotional health.2. Self-image and perception of one's personal situation3. Stress reduction 4. Social connections. 5. Spiritual growth. The reason that the highest priority goes to emotional health is simple. Aging studies as well as studies of lifestyle diseases like coronary artery disease indicate that the people who are emotionally healthiest also have the healthiest bodies. This shouldn't be surprising given that the opposite is true: people with the poorest mental health fall into low categories of physical health. But doctors haven't followed up on this finding, in large part because they aren't trained to (nor is there much proof that doctors themselves fall into the high group for emotional health -- their susceptibility to stress, Type-A behavior and drug abuse indicates the exact opposite, in fact). If it were possible to get people to put spiritual growth first, that would be extremely desirable, for reasons I will go into. But realistically, getting Americans to take their emotional health and stress levels seriously is already a huge challenge. The huge advantage of spiritual growth is that mind and body are both benefited from a very deep level. What we traditionally call the soul can also be defined as the source of the mind-body connection, and the closer to the source one can get, the more effortlessly nature itself can prevent the decline associated with aging. In the next post we will cover how the five parts of this mind-body program can be followed on a practical basis. (to be continued)
Click: www.intentblog.com